ABSTRACT
Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) of SARS-CoV-2 emerged as an advantageous method to study the infection dynamics at substantial population level. A temporal glimpse at sewage viral genome helps as diagnostic tool to understand the viral spread at community level. In this study, for the long-term epidemiological surveillance, we monitored the SARS-CoV-2 genetic material in domestic sewage by adopting the longitudinal sampling to represent a selected community ([~]1.8 lakhs population which occupies 1.79% of the total population of Hyderabad city) to understand the dynamics of infection. Dynamics and spread of COVID-19 outbreak within the selected community were achieved by studying the longitudinal sampling for a specific period of time. WBE also promotes clinical scrutiny along with disease detection and management, in contrast to an advance warning signal to anticipate outbreaks.
ABSTRACT
Post COVID-19 outbreak, wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) studies as surveillance system is becoming an emerging interest due to its functional advantage as tool for early warning signal and to catalyze effective disease management strategies based on the community diagnosis. A comprehensive attempt was made in this study to define a methodological approach for conducting WBE studies in the framework of identifying/selection of surveillance sites, standardizing sampling policy, designing sampling protocols to improve sensitivity, adopting safety protocol, and interpreting the data. The methodology was applied to a community and studied its epidemiological status with reference to occurrence, persistence, and variation of SARS-CoV-2 genome load in wastewater system to understand the prevalence of infection. Hourly and daily grab samples were analyzed and compared with the composite samples over a surveillance window of 7 days. Based on the SARS-CoV-2 RNA copies/L, faeces shedding, and volume of sewage generated the infected individuals and the population who are in active phase in the studied community was estimated.
